What Great Teachers Do Differently

Think about a teacher who has helped you succeed before.

What did they do differently from the rest?

The answer can probably be summarized in three paragraphs, as you’ll see.

When Jonathan Fields, entrepreneur, and founder of The Good Life Project, interviewed Anders Ericsson, the famous researcher who discovered the 10,000-hour rule, he got to ask Ericsson a question that had been bugging him for years:

“If this [deliberate] practice is so often experienced as unforgiving, bordering, at times, on brutal, what makes someone keep doing it long enough to reach mastery?”

Ericsson’s answer: the teacher.

Fields says a great teacher does three things: removes blind spots, installs new models, and blends process with progress.

Fields explains:

An accomplished teacher not only changes practice into deliberate practice, she makes it what Ericsson calls “purposeful practice.” She not only sees what you cannot, but is able to draw from a vastly larger set of experiences, models and solutions.

This lets her help you progress in three ways:

Removing blindness – she makes your blind spots visible. She lets you see what you previously could not.

Installing new models – she has better resources to share entire approaches, methodologies, ideas, strategies, tactics, nuanced shifts and tweaks that can shortcut the path to expertise, leapfrogging past the time it would’ve taken to figure out the same via experimentation.

Blending process with progress– here’s where the answer I’ve sought for years takes shape. She creates and eases you through an incremental process, designed to offset the angst of deliberate practice with a series of small, yet meaningful wins. stoking the embers of what Harvard Business School’s Director of Research, Teresa Amabile, calls the greatest motivator of all. Progress!

This last bit, number three, is the thing that’s not often covered in the literature or popular press. The quiet progress approach. Guided by a generous and wise teacher, often seeking not the limelight, but the shadows, and leaving a lineage of masters in her wake. These are Mr. Miyagi’s of the world, with their elusively simple, yet profound and progressive demeanors and methodologies.

If your goal is to master your craft, step one is to find yourself a teacher who will help you progress like this.

Nick Papple
Managing EditorSuccess Formula Daily

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The Truth About Passion

By Ryan Holiday

Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and per­severance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be ear­nest and good, its effects are comical and then monstrous. Passion is seen in those who can tell you in great detail who they intend to become and what their success will be like — they might even be able to tell you specifically when they intend to achieve it or describe to you legitimate and sincere worries they have about the burdens of such accom­plishments. They can tell you all the things they’re going to do, or have even begun, but they cannot show you their prog­ress. Because there rarely is any.